74 THENEWYORKER, OCTOBER 28, 2019
years as a telegrapher for Western Union
and other companies, taking jobs wher-
ever he could find them—Indiana,
Ohio, Tennessee, Kentucky. He had
time to experiment on the side, and
he patented his first invention in 1869:
an electric vote recorder that eliminated
the need for roll call by instantly tally-
ing votes. It worked so well that no
legislative body wanted it, because it
left no time for lobbying amid the yeas
and nays.
That failure cured Edison of any in-
terest in invention for invention’s sake:
from then on, he cultivated a taste for
the practical and the profitable. Although
legislators did not want their votes
counted faster, everyone else wanted ev-
erything else to move as quickly as pos-
sible. Financial companies, for instance,
wanted their stock information imme-
diately, and communication companies
wanted to speed up their telegram ser-
vice. Edison’s first lucrative products
were a stock-ticker device and a quadru-
plex telegraph, capable of sending four
messages at once. Armed with those in-
ventions, he found financial support for
his telegraphy research, and used money
from Western Union to buy an aban-
doned building in New Jersey to serve
as a workshop.
In 1875, having outgrown that site,
he bought thirty acres not far from New-
ark and began converting the property
into what he liked to call
his Invention Factory. It
was organized around a
two-story laboratory, with
chemistry experiments on
the top floor and a machine
shop below. Workshops are
at least as old as Hephaes-
tus, but Edison’s was the
world’s first research-and-
development facility—a
model that would later be
adopted by governments, universities,
and rival corporations. Menlo Park, as
it came to be known, was arguably Ed-
ison’s most significant invention, since
it facilitated so many others, by allow-
ing for the division of problems into
discrete chemical, electrical, and phys-
ical components, which teams of work-
ers could solve through theory and then
experimentation before moving directly
into production.
Menlo Park also included a three-
story house for Edison’s family. In 1871,
when he was twenty-four, he married
a sixteen-year-old girl named Mary
Stilwell, who had taken refuge in his
office during a rainstorm. They had
three children, two of whom Edison
nicknamed Dot and Dash. It is likely
thanks to them that the first audio re-
cording ever made, in November of
1877, features Papa Edison reciting
“Mary Had a Little Lamb.”
The phonograph came about be-
cause Edison had been experiment-
ing with telephones, trying to improve
on Alexander Graham Bell’s trans-
mitter to achieve better sound quality
across longer distances. He first had
in mind a kind of answering machine
that would transcribe the contents of
a call, but he quickly realized that it
might be possible to record the voice
itself. To test the idea, Edison spoke
into a diaphragm with a needle at-
tached; as he spoke, the needle vibrated
against a piece of paraffin paper, carving
into it the ups and downs of the sound
waves. To everyone’s surprise, the de-
sign worked: when he added a sec-
ond needle to retrace the marks in the
paper, the vibrating diaphragm repro-
duced Edison’s voice.
So novel was the talking machine
that many people refused to believe in
its existence—understandably, since,
up to that point in history, sound had
been entirely ephemeral.
But once they heard it with
their own ears they all
wanted one, and scores of
new investors opened their
pockets to help Edison
meet the demand. With
this infusion of cash, Edi-
son was able to hire doz-
ens of new “muckers,” as
the men who worked with
him would eventually be-
come known. (The endearment may
have taken hold during his ill-fated
mining days: “muck” is a term for ore,
which his men tried, and failed, to re-
move from mines more efficiently.)
This was the team that banished
the darkness, or at least made it sub-
ject to a switch. By the eighteen-sev-
enties, plenty of homes were lit with
indoor gas lamps, but they produced
terrible fumes and covered everything
in soot. Arc lights, which buzzed likewelders’ torches in a few cities around
the world, were, in the words of Rob-
ert Louis Stevenson, “horrible, un-
earthly, obnoxious to the human eye;
a lamp for a nightmare.” What Edison
and his muckers did was figure out a
way to regulate incandescent light, mak-
ing the bulbs burn longer and more re-
liably, and at a more bearable bright-
ness. The filament was the trickiest
part, and he and his team tried hun-
dreds of materials before settling on
carbon, which they got to burn for four-
teen and a half hours in the fall of 1879.
(A year later, when they tried carbon-
ized bamboo, it burned for more than
a thousand hours.)
By the New Year, individual light
bulbs had given way to a network of il-
lumination around Menlo Park, which
became known as the Village of Light.
Gawkers came every night to see the
apricot smudges of light through the
windows of Edison’s house and along
the streets, marvelling at how the bulbs
stayed lit through wind and rain, shin-
ing steadily and silently, and could be
turned on and off with ease. The world
was still measured in candlepower, and
each bulb had the brightness of sixteen
candles. Menlo Park had barely been a
stop on the railway line when Edison
first moved there. Now, in a single day,
hundreds of passengers would empty
from the trains to see the laboratory
that made night look like noon.
Edison’s patent attorney worried
about the publicity, especially when the
likes of George Westinghouse and Ed-
ward Weston came calling. But, by Feb-
ruary, 1880, Edison had executed Pat-
ent No. 223,898, for the electric lamp,
and No. 369,280, for a system of elec-
trical distribution. He put both to use
in winning a contract to electrify part
of New York City, and built a generat-
ing plant on Pearl Street that eventu-
ally served more than nine hundred
customers. While supervising the con-
struction of the plant, Edison moved
his family to Gramercy Park; then, in
August, 1884, Mary died suddenly, offi-
cially from “congestion of the brain,”
though possibly of a morphine over-
dose. She was twenty-nine. After her
death, Edison left Menlo Park for good.
One long season of grief and two
years later, he married Mina Miller, the
twenty-year-old daughter of one of the